Vaccination plans that target essential workers would not only be more equitable but would lead to fewer cases, deaths and people suffering chronic COVID-19 symptoms, according to a new preprint study from Simon Fraser University modelling experts. It would still provide “a significant level of indirect protection” for older adults.
The study was based on models that included current COVID-19 conditions in B.C. and used age and essential worker data from the province.
Results also suggest that vaccinating B.C.’s essential workers could lead to reopening the economy “months sooner than if we go age based,” said Dr. Caroline Colijn, Research Chair in Mathematics for Evolution, Infection and Public Health at SFU and an author of the study.
“What we found in the modelling is that the benefit of vaccinating the people who have high contact is actually a lot higher than the benefits from our age based rollout,” said Colijn.
Essential workers in B.C. are defined as those services “essential to preserving life, health, public safety and basic societal functioning,” and includes everything from health care workers and public safety staff, to people working in grocery stores, food processing plants and community services like child care, among others.
“The pandemic has disproportionately impacted essential workers,” the authors wrote in the report, noting that COVID-19 cases and deaths were as much as three times higher in Toronto neighbourhoods with high concentrations of essential workers.
“It is absolutely right that we started with long term care,” Colijn said. “That was the top priority, and it should have been the top priority.”
But she noted that essential workers have many more daily contacts than older adults and vaccinating them is the most effective way of reducing the overall number of COVID-19 cases.
“If we can vaccinate essential workers, we are much more resilient,” she said. “And we get that benefit with vaccinating only about 10 to 15 per cent of our population who are in these jobs where they have to have high contact.”
Colijn said she has received pushback from people who insist that an age-based model, focused on vaccinating those at highest risk of dying from COVID-19, is the best approach.
“Getting hospitalized and dying are not the only bad things that ever happened because of COVID,” she said, noting that chronic impacts from the disease “are really important to pay attention to” and can affect everyone, regardless of age.
“There’s some knowledge that virus induced chronic fatigue doesn’t go away,” she said. “And that probably won’t be different for COVID than it was for SARS”.
By prioritizing certain health care workers, B.C. is already following a strategy of vaccinating essential workers first, Colijn added. It’s just one where the definition of “essential worker” is limited to health care workers.
“Your GP is vaccinated,” Colijn noted. “That’s not because your GP is at a huge risk of dying if they get COVID. … It’s because they have exposure or risk from their patients, and they’re a risk for their patients.”
“But it’s the same for firefighters or grocery store workers,” she added.
“By vaccinating a 65 year old retired person who is safely housed — who doesn’t need to go out — months and months ahead of a 25 year old worker in a meat processing plant or in a grocery store,” Colijn said, “we are not using our vaccines most effectively.”
Preprint studies are research papers made public before they have been peer reviewed, a critical step in scientific publishing. Preprint publishing has exploded during the pandemic, as scientists pushed to get information out as quickly as possible while awaiting peer review.
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2021
